The invention is based on a feed pump which has been disclosed by DE 44 41 505, U.S. Pat. No. 5,597,291, and is used for feeding fuel from a storage tank to a fuel injection pump of an internal combustion engine.
The feed pump is embodied as a geared feed pump which has a pair of gears that engage in an externally meshed fashion. The rotationally driven pair of gears feeds fuel from an intake chamber connected to the storage tank, along a supply conduit constituted between the end faces of the gears and the circumference wall of the pump chamber, and into a pressure chamber from which a supply line leads to the fuel injection pump.
However, the known feed pump has the disadvantage that the radial forces acting on the gears are directly transmitted as lateral forces onto the drive shaft and the axle of the driven gear so that these must be dimensioned as correspondingly large.
Furthermore, with the known feed pump, there is insufficient lubrication of the gears at their bearings so that particularly with larger gear widths, there is the danger of the lubricant being spread thin and consequently an increased frictional wear occurs.